


Blabbermouth

by DCFanGuy



Category: Batman (Comics), Birds of Prey (Comic)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 08:09:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20503682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DCFanGuy/pseuds/DCFanGuy
Summary: Jack Ryder has been kidnapped and about to be killed for real, due to his big mouth. Based on some of the rumoured characterisation for Birds Of Prey.





	Blabbermouth

It should’ve been his night off. He could’ve had a hot date from the intern pool or that hottie he saw cruising him at the gym or even gone to see his father, but for Jack Ryder, there was no night off when a hot story was afoot. Not to mention he was too much a professional to ever trawl the intern pool for a date as such.

One of his sources had tipped him off that Roman Sionis was planning something big. That in itself was hardly newsworthy as everyone knew that Sionis, otherwise known as the Black Mask was one of Gotham’s worst criminals but like a certain feathered moniker who runs the Iceberg Lounge, Sionis also had a very legal company in Janus Industries in order to present an air of legality for his more nefarious activities. 

The something big though was something that the source himself wouldn’t explicitly say as he feared being killed in the middle of the night but he did say it was something that if exposed would cripple Sionis’s hold on quite a few of the gangs in Gotham. Now Jack had to find out what it was.

There was a party in the Iceberg Lounge and Ryder knew that Sionis would be attending for a few hours. Enough of a window for Jack to pay a little visit into Janus Industries and get the information he needed. He also knew that his method was a bit on the unethical side, his chances of getting caught and possibly killed were rather high and he would’ve been better off contacting the Batman and leaving this to him, but Jack wanted the scoop. He wasn’t ashamed to admit that and it was time the Caped Crusader and his growing list of vigilantes realised that the media’s role in preventing crime was as important as his or the GCPD’s.

Jack had managed to slip past security (it helped that an altercation between two Janus lower level employees had erupted at the same time) and somehow had managed to get into Roman’s office. His source had given him the password to Sionis’s computer and Jack did wonder for a moment if this was a gift horse that was a little too good to be true. 

The moment passed however and Jack soon found himself into Roman’s private files, accounts and so on. Jack had a flash drive handy to take this information, most of which wasn’t too shocking for a criminal mastermind like Black Mask. That was until he read another file and this was one that really got his attention.

It seemed that Roman had big plans to cement himself as the ultimate criminal kingpin of Gotham and while most aspiring kingpins would prioritise getting rid of the Batman once and for all, Jack read on to see that Roman intended to focus on the criminal competition first – namely a certain green haired lunatic, who was as much as a problem for the criminals of Gotham as he was for the good citizens of the city and it’s growing list of crime fighters. 

He’s absolutely mad. Jack read on, genuinely gripped by the rather detailed plan that Black Mask for ridding the city of it’s biggest menace. Still if he pulls it off, he’d be seen as a hero to many. Even Batman might have a hard time in stopping Black Mask after this.

With Jack a little too enamored with his reading material on Sionis’s computer, he didn’t realize that there was a private elevator that directly went into Roman’s office. The door pinged and a tallish man with dyed blond hair was now in the same office, a little surprised by an intruder reading his boss’s private workings but nonetheless prepared to deal with said intruder. Jack on the other hand was not prepared for this.

“Hi, Jack,” Victor Zsasz smiled before punching him right in the face with ferocious force. “Looking for something?”

Jack slumped to the floor in an unconscious heap as Victor pulled out his phone and made a necessary phone call to his boss.

“You might want to come back, boss,” Victor said, glancing an eye over to see that Jack was still knocked out. “We’ve got an unwanted guest.”

After some swearing down the phone, Black Mask agreed to ditch the party in favour of dealing with the problem.

Victor knew that now he had Jack Ryder unconscious, there was two things that needed to be done before his boss arrived and there, Zsasz had a half an hour window. The first was to tie up the unwanted guest and keep him quiet while the second was to find out who tipped him off in the first place. The latter was made easy by simply grabbing Ryder’s phone and leafing through his messages and contacts. 

When Zsasz realised who was leaking information to Ryder, he made another call to Lukas and Darien to bring a certain someone upstairs and fast. As for Ryder, some zip ties and a few cloths came in handy there as he had the nosy anchorman bound and gagged and seated on the couch in Sionis’s office in enough time before the boss man himself and the traitor in the mix arrived in moments of one another.

“I had to give him something, boss,” Slick squealed rather pathetically as he tried to shift the blame onto Ryder. “He just wouldn’t stop. You’ve seen his show. You know what he’s like when he thinks there’s a story.”

“Yes, I’ve seen his show,” Black Mask said, sounding reasonable enough. For a moment Slick thought he might have reasoned with him, little knowing that Sionis had quietly picked up a letter opener and gashed Slick’s throat with it.

“Boss!” Slick croaked, realising in horror what had just happened to him.

“I also know what you’re like, you little shit,” Black Mask barked at Slick, who was struggling to stop the blood from gushing out of his throat. “Unfortunately for you, you’ve outlived any usefulness you could’ve had.”

Slick just gasped desperately as he fell to the floor. Jack would’ve looked away if it hadn’t been for the thug standing beside him with a gun pointed to his head. 

“I really have no time for a blabbermouth, do you?” Black Mask everyone in the room.

“No!” the two thugs said in unison.

“No, sir,” Zsasz said with a bit more feeling in his voice.

Jack could only just look at the dead man on the ground but it seemed that Black Mask hadn’t been particularly interested in his input. 

“Get rid of that, you two,” Black Mask said sharply before cleaning the letter opener with his pocket square. “Make it look like a mugging gone wrong.”

“Yes, sir,” both thugs said as they picked up their dead co-worker and discreetly left the room, relieved that it hadn’t been them who squealed on their boss.

With Slick’s body being carried out of the room, the attention was back onto Jack and normally that would’ve been something the latter would’ve enjoyed. In these circumstances however, not so much.

“Now what to do you with you?” Sionis asked, swapping the letter opener for a gun that he now had pointed at Ryder’s head. “Too quick and it lacks a certain finesse. A man of your standing, Mr Ryder at least deserves a death with finesse.”

“I could think of a few ideas with plenty of finesse,” Zsasz said, his voice oddly flirtatious as he stepped between Jack Ryder and Black Mask. The latter lowered his gun, his attention focused on the tally marked serial killer instead of the bound anchorman.

Do you two want to get a room? Jack noticed there was a certain tension with these two. He had heard some rumours about it but now it seemed like he was getting a free show before a worse fate awaited him.

“You’re a very talented man, Mr Zsasz,” Roman said sincerely, grazing Victor’s chin with his thumb before looking over at Jack’s futile attempt to free himself. “Perhaps you should show our local anchorman just how talented you are. You know the place.”

“It would be my absolute pleasure, sir,” Zsasz smiled before grabbing Jack by his right arm and dragging him out of the office. “Come on you, we’ve got a date.”

Jack struggled as he was being dragged away and could’ve sworn that Black Mask blew him a mocking kiss as he left the office to head down a corridor, into an elevator and down into the parking lot where Zsasz wasted no time shoving Jack into the trunk of a car before driving off. 

Black Mask turned to look at his computer, knowing that weeks of careful planning had nearly been for nothing. He took the flash drive that Ryder hadn’t time to remove and broke it two before tossing it into the bin. He wanted to burst into a rage but there was no one in sight to project his anger on and he regretted at least not slapping Jack Ryder once before Victor took him away. At least Victor would deal with the problem and deal with it well. Ryder would be hopefully missing for a week or so before his body would unfortunately turn up, though Roman imagined in many pieces if Victor really put his heart and soul into the task at hand. 

Roman poured himself a scotch from his liquor cabinet before changing the password on his computer, this time to something he hoped would be less obvious. After he downed his drink, he switched off the lights and locked the door of his office with the intent of heading back to the Iceberg Lounge where he hoped no-one had missed him for too long. 

It took a while but they had landed at their destination. Jack had been struggling to free himself, while desperately crying out help as Victor drowned out the anchorman’s protests with some enthusiastically cheery singing to an old disco album. For Jack, this was already pure hell and then the car stopped with Victor opening the boot.

“Don’t say I don’t take you to the most exciting of places for a date, honey,” Victor smirked, dragging Jack our of the car and yanking the gag out of his mouth before Jack spat out the ball of cloth that had been kept in place. 

“This is not a date and I’d go for a less knife happy boyfriend if I swung that way,” Jack interjected before realising they were at the docks. “I see your boss chose an obvious place to get you to get rid of me then. Not very creative, is it?”

“Your hands are tied and I can gag you very easily, Jack,” Victor warned, grabbing the anchorman by his shirt. “Do you really want to make this more unpleasant than it has to be?”

“So what was it that drew you, Victor Zsasz, a known serial killer who marks his own skin after each kill to Roman Sionis aka Black Mask aka probably one of Batman’s D Lister of villains to one another?” Jack couldn’t resist showing some defiance. Victor’s look was of someone not impressed.

“We have a bond,” Victor retorted. “Namely sorting this city out, once and for all and we can’t have anyone putting paid to that. If you think you’re gonna rile me up by insinuating that I’m some sort of mindless lackey, then Jack, you really don’t know me at all.”

With that last sentence, Jack could feel that Victor was inches away from actually kissing him and then the latter did, but only on the cheek to intimidate him. Jack didn’t flinch but decided to goad him a little more or at least delay the inevitable of course.

“I’m sure you two have more in common than that,” Jack said unwisely, but kept going nonetheless, desperate to keep Victor distracted for as long as he could. “Maybe less homicidal things to be exact. Hey, I’m not judging. If you just let me go, we can pretend this whole night never happened. I mean your boss has probably destroyed my flash drive, seeing as you knocked me out before I could take it and get out of there. It would only be my word against his and luckily for him, I have no back ups.”

“You really do talk too much, Mr Ryder,” Zsasz replied stuffing the cloth back into Jack’s mouth before tying the other cloth around it to silence him. “Unfortunately for a man in your soon to be former line of work, you really don’t know how to read a room or when to shut up.”

Zsasz held up his knife to Jack’s throat, giving the television reporter a lascivious look that nearly made his blood run cold with horror while having a tight grip on the reporter’s neck with his other hand. 

“See, I’m in a bit of a pickle here, Jack,” Zsasz smiled, not taking a little thing such as personal space get in the way of circling the knife around Jack’s throat and face. “It would be so much easier to strap you down to this conveyor belt and let this machine grind you into pieces, but that’s quick, far too quick for someone as irritating as you.”

Zsasz twirled Jack around as though they were in a dance, just so the latter could see the spiked blades on the machine that would kill him painfully before facing Victor once again and having a knife aimed at his cheek. He could see from the look in Zsasz’s eyes that the latter was aching to slice him.

“You see with this knife, I can take my time with you,” Victor said in a seductive manner. “Really get to know you, piece by piece. Even give you a little longer on this planet before you die. I really don’t know what to do.”

Let me go, you goddamn psychopath! Jack muffled furiously, leaving no room for Victor to misinterpret what he was saying. You won’t get away with this, you sick monster!

“Don’t think I can’t tell what you’re saying behind that gag, Jack,” Victor’s voice was slipping from being playful into menacing. “But you made your choice when you decided to go snooping. Look at this way, instead of reporting the news tomorrow, you get to be the news instead. That should appeal to your ego.”

“Fuck you!” Jack muffled in fury but Zsasz laughed and raised his knife, having picked where he planned to strike Ryder first.

“Voice box it is then,” Zsasz said, noting the sudden terror in Jack’s eyes and savouring every bit of it. “This is Jack Ryder signing off.”

“Not tonight,” a voice loomed and all of a sudden both Victor Zsasz and Jack Ryder realised that they were not alone. 

Of course he showed up. What took him so long?

His presence alone was enough for Zsasz to forget about taking care of a nosy anchorman and was more than enough for Zsasz to go after the Caped Crusader with a ferocious force. The two of them fought, giving as good as each other as Jack did his damndest to free himself but to no avail. At least not until Zsasz’s knife was knocked out of his hands and he was thrown outside the warehouse with the Dark Knight in pursuit of the tally marked killer. Jack cut the restraints off himself and managed to pull the gag out of his mouth before picking something resembling a metal bar as well as Zsasz’s knife to arm himself if he needed to.

By the time he stepped outside, Victor Zsasz had been tied up and gagged himself with Batman keeping a tight hold on his neck.

“Not much to say now, huh, Mr Zsasz?” Jack couldn’t help but show some pleasure at the current predicament of the man who came close to killing him a few minutes ago. 

“He’ll have plenty to say soon enough,” Batman said somberly as Jack noticed that both Detective Bullock and a young male cop were driving towards them.

“I’ve been waiting to book this creep for ages,” Bullock smiled as Victor looked more irritated to see him. “I’ve got a nice little cell with your name on it and a straitjacket so you don’t get creative with your hands.”

“No-one likes a blabbermouth,” Victor muffled from his gag, glaring at both Jack Ryder and Batman as Bullock grabbed a hold of him and dragged him into the car like he was a ragdoll. Another cop sedated Zsasz so he wouldn’t pose any trouble on the way to Blackgate.

“I can give you the inside scoop because that psycho boy is too loyal to his boss to do so,” Jack said and with that, both him and Batman had a rather interesting conversation, one which then got the attention of the GCPD. 

Less than an hour later, Roman Sionis found himself getting a message with a picture of his lover in a predicament. Then he received a house call from the last person in Gotham he ever wanted to see. 

You’ll pay for this, Jack Ryder.

Those were Roman’s last words as he soon found himself handcuffed and dragged out of his own home in the dead of night, aware that he master plan had been undone by one very persistent man.

\---- The End ----


End file.
